Venkatesh Rao

Fiction and engineering are so full of detail because they must either become part of reality (engineering results in real things) or present a sufficiently realistic illusion of it to allow immersion. But the theoretical cousins don’t need to be.

Or in the case of engineering, consider the vast gulf between the schematic CAD drawing of a minimalist widget vs the widget itself. Where widget = coffee mug, armchair, iPhone body...

The point is, don’t confuse the minimalism or lack thereof in a design for there actually being fewer details that need binding. When people get lazy about binding details using minimalist aesthetics as an excuse you end up with designs or stories that don’t work at all.

I like minimalism done well where there is no good reason to complicate things, and so long as you you don’t sacrifice details that matter (a la infamous Apple puck mouse). I’m not a fractal-fetish trad, prizing texture in fiction/engineering for its own illegibly vitalist sake.

But for all but the simplest artifacts and stories, I do like non-minimalism in a different sense: opinionated design. I don’t need richly textured design. But I like things and takes where a few interchangeable aspects have been elevated to influential or essential aspects.

Interchangeable aspects of a design define a vast design space. Indifferent design picks randomly or lazily (eg uncritical imitation) from the space, which is as it should be for most details. But if you don’t promote say 5-20% of detail to influential, you fail in a key way.

The thing is, vast design spaces are scary and distressing to experience. They channel the vast indifference of the universe. It’s like a total perspective vortex. Opinionated design cuts that vast dimensionality a bit and makes you feel a bit more at home in the universe.